Fri 3/24 @ 7-9PM
The Cleveland Museum of Art’s Gartner Auditorium will be hosting a free concert called Toward a Different Kind of Horizon, a collaborative concert with four artists: Moor Mother, Lonnie Holley, Lee Bains, and Cleveland’s Mourning [A] BLKstar.
“Bringing these world-class artists together in Cleveland is a dream,” says concert organizer AJ Kluth, a lecturer in the Department of Music at Case Western Reserve University, in the event’s press release. “I’m excited we’ve been able to make this concert free for the community. This music is adventurous, but it’s for everybody.”
Camae Ayewa, known as Moor Mother, is a composer, poet, vocalist and educator who came out of Philadephia’s underground music scene. She performs with Afrofuturist literary/artistic collective Black Quantum Futurism and co-leads Irreversible Entanglements and 700 Bliss. Her most recent record, Jazz Codes, came out last year.
Holley is an artist, musician and educator who came from an impoverished, violent background in Alabama. In classic folk art style, he eventually began creating art from found materials and applied a similar approach to his experimental, improvisational music which has found favor among indie hipsters: Michael Stipe, Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon and Sharon Van Etten (as well as Moor Mother) appear on his new album Oh Me Oh My.
Like Holley, Bains as born in Birmingham, Alabama, though the indie rocker’s background is less fraught than Holley’s; he’s also a generation younger, white and his band the Glory Fires is signed to Seattle’s ultra-cool Sub Pop Records. But the songs on his album Deconstructed take an unsparing look at the life, history and beliefs of the Deep South.
Mourning [A] BLKstar, founded in 2015 by writer/activist/musician R.A. Washington, has grown from a quartet to an octet, expanding its sonic range, which draws on soul, jazz, blues, electronic music and spoken word to create a nuanced view of Black life in America today and its history. Its describes itself as “a multi-generational, gender and genre non-conforming amalgam of Black Culture dedicated to servicing the stories and songs of the apocalyptic diaspora.”
For information and tickets go here.